So there I was wandering among the offerings on Netflix, when I found Dead Ringers.
It had been dangling in the Prime lineup for over six months, as mysterious as a sea creature from David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III (which, in brief, is blue, full of alarm about our desecration of the sea , and also full of aquatic marvels—the Angel Shark is as ghastly as the Sea Angel is soothing)
Dead Ringers. I remembered the 1988 David Cronenberg film ‘Dead Ringers’ for the great performances by Jeremy Irons as the perverse identical-twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who vied for possession of an actress played by Genevieve Bujold. I remembered shining trays of surgical instruments, and how the light glinted along a speculum, or was it a pair of forceps? The film was a theatrical overstatement that exploited the sinister potential of medical paraphernalia, the voyeuristic intimations of gynecology, and went down like a cold, fun, nasty treat.
I feared the Amazon version might be made of marzipan. How could the sweet features of Rachel Weisz compare with the cheekbones of Jeremy Irons?
I wasn’t yet aware of the power of Alice Birch’s writing. I was stung by the barbed dialogue, then entranced by a pitiless logic that told the story in a new way. Dead Ringers took the slasher tale about twin gynecologists to the chthonic underworld of dark female mysteries. And I mean dark, and full of rage.
The rage of women is nothing like the rage of men. In fiction the rage of women is traditionally viewed from the outside, at a safe distance from which to present madwomen and witches. From Mrs. Rochester , Rebecca , and Baby Jane, all the way back into myth, to Medea, Medusa, Kali, and Nemesis herself.
Nemesis: the unforgiving one.
Recently, Nemesis has been writing her own scripts. Women writers , mainly British, have been using the long form of television to jolt expectations by drawing uncomfortable truths from each premise. They plunge below the contracted truce into the dark undertow of the unspoken.
They never try to elicit your pity, nor do they want your sympathy. This is fierce, pitiless writing.
Think of ‘Fleabag’, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show spun into an irresistible series about a London woman’s grief, frustration, and rage. Many were put off by Phoebe Waller Bridge’s unapologetic coldness in the first episode . If they stayed with her, they were rewarded by fresh storytelling, with asides to camera, roaming urban foxes, a guinea-pig themed café, a stepmother who makes penis art, and a hot priest.
Think of ‘I May Destroy You’, the series written by and starring Micaela Coel as a promising young London screenwriter, whose reactions— after waking with a gash on her forehead and intermittent memories of being drugged and raped— run from uncertainty about whether it happened at all to bracing levels of annihilating, Kali-level revenge rage.
Think of ‘Happy Valley’, written by Sally Wainwright and set in Yorkshire, in which the Yorkshire heroine (played by Sarah Lancashire) has the attributes used to humanize older male cops — fatigue , looming retirement, bad temper, contempt for the boss—and also has female loyalties that could kill .
Instead of the standard trio of male problems—drugs, alcohol, temper--- each heroine has to deal with her infinite capacity for loathing family, friends, and lovers.
The Netflix series Dead Ringers is written by Alice Birch, who is its show runner and executive producer. She is British, 37 years old, and wrote the 2016 film Lady Macbeth, eleven episodes of the series Normal People, ten episodes of Succession; in my enthusiasm, I’d easily credit Roman Roy’s attitude and his skewed syntax to Alice Birch, but I have no evidence.
In the Joan of Art podcast, I called this Bitch writing. Correction here: it should be Birch writing.
The Alice Birch-Rachel Weisz Dead Ringers is violently female, elbow-deep in secretions, rooted in blood as the basis of the female experience. Its conflicts play out between the sharp and the viscous, blades and fluids , penetration and expulsion. The plot is ferociously vaginal, structured along bloody blobs: menstruation, miscarriage, birth. Only women approach blood in this way, not as the result of violent death, but as companion to the violent arrival of life.
Dead Ringers opens in a late-night New York diner as the exhausted gynecologists chow down after a long day. Elliott and Beverly Mantle talk with British accents in vehement half whispers. The face of each Rachel Weisz twin is soft , but soft does not mean gentle, not here.Beverly, her black hair pulled back and parted in the middle like Beth in Little Women, eats eggs. Elliott, black hair loose, shoves a burger into her mouth, licking her lips and sucking her fingers. Is she as sensual as British television’s cooking goddess Nigella Lawson, or simply orally compulsive?
A leering creep opens with “You guys have exactly the same face,” then suggests a threesome.
It’s prim-looking Beverly who replies : “We just cut a baby out of woman’s womb -- she asked us to , we didn’t like , just do it -- but what I’d like to do now, the very next thing that I would like to do after I’ve finished these eggs, is fuck my sister in front of you.”
She’s as rudely sarcastic as Roman Roy, but Dead Ringers embraces the broader context that Succession lacked.
Dead Ringers is about doctors, so it’s a critique of the American medical industry. And because these doctors must raise money to build their own birthing center, it’s a critique of the insanely rich. We meet the entitled, rapacious opioid-billionaire Parker family, who will fund the twins’ birthing center as long as it makes money for them, and incidentally gives them a chance to retain the dewiness of youth.
Beverly and Elliot arrive upstate for a weekend at the complicated household of Rebecca Parker (played with murderously quiet confidence by Jennifer Ehle) . As good English guests who want funding, they gush appreciation at the dinner table, but Rebecca Parker, who sits framed by a giant picture of her ex-girlfriend’s genitals, crushes them with : “Literally nothing here is for your benefit.” Her new girlfriend Susan, an irrepressible socialized pea-brain, tries to lighten the mood through the contrived meal that begins with non-alcoholic ‘Champagne of Kombucha’ and moves on to, as Rebecca explains, “crickets, cactus-worms, bison shot by Susan, and a horse—it was my racehorse. He was loved, and now we’re going to consume him”.
That’s the Alice Birch Nemesis version of theatrical overstatement:Champagne of Kombucha and a subtle hint of cannibalism.
To help out shy Beverly, Elliott initiates the seduction of an actress named Genevieve (Britne Oldford). It works. As Beverly’s relationship with Genevieve flowers, confident Elliot loses her grip.
The twins’ parents come to visit . They are modest, tentative Brits, not as accomplished as their twins . The mother, played by the great Suzanne Bertish , tries to muster some authority by baking a birthday cake, but somewhere around the worst birthday party ever, she’s told “We just roll you out every four years to prove we’re not sociopaths”.
It’s a splendidly wrought visceral thriller, with a soundtrack divided between music from Elvis, Moby, Diana Ross, Loudoun Wainwright, and grunts, sighs and the insistent buzzing of a cell phone. The scrubs are crimson, the logic remains coherent through the grand guignol, and despite lighting so moody it’s sulking and an unbelievable subplot about the secret life of the housekeeper, it’s a most excellent hot, nasty, forbidden treat.
Now I must watch!